What changes
Under UAE e-invoicing, an invoice is no longer a document you email. It is structured data, in the UAE's e-invoice data format, sent through an Accredited Service Provider to your customer's provider, with tax data reported to the Federal Tax Authority.
You can keep making invoices in a spreadsheet for now, but each one has to reach your provider as data. That means every field the format needs has to exist in your sheet, filled in the same way on every row.
What your sheet needs
One row per invoice line works best, with a column for each of these:
- Invoice number, unique to each invoice
- Invoice date, written the same way on every row
- Your TRN, and your customer's TRN for business customers
- Customer name and address
- Item description, quantity and unit price
- Line amount before VAT, VAT rate and VAT amount
- Currency, and the exchange rate to AED for any other currency
- For a credit note, the number of the invoice it corrects
The problems we see most
Dates typed in different formats, so 03/11 means March on one row and November on the next. TRNs typed with spaces, missing a digit, or missing altogether. VAT amounts that were typed rather than calculated, so they no longer match the line. Credit notes that do not say which invoice they correct. Invoice numbers reused when a sheet was copied.
None of these is hard to fix on its own. The work is finding every one of them, across months of invoices, before your provider rejects them.
Where to start
Export a few months of sales invoices from your sheet as CSV or XLSX and run the free invoice check. It runs in your browser and shows which lines are ready and what to fix. Then check your deadline with the readiness check.